Or… stuff and nonsense.

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Monthly Archives: January 2003

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Lots
of people on Bullet are going on about how the world’s gummed up with metres
of snow. I want to know where the snow order went to, it must have all been
dumped down south as there was very little which landed here and most of
that has melted during the day.

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My life seems so stable and dull relative to other people’s. Maybe I should
add some virtual angst to make it more of an interesting read?

I think I’m just comfortably in one of the Universe’s back waters, gently
rotating in the eddie behind a rock as the gushing flood thunders by taking
other people’s lives with it. In that way I think I’m blessed and lucky.

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It’s
Monday morning. I’m feeling tired and not ready for the week ahead. I’m sure
I wouldn’t feel this way if things had gone differently last night…

The weekend, on the whole, was quiet but I managed to keep myself reasonably
entertained by just tinkering. Saturday saw me buying a replacement CPU heatsink
for my “big” computer because the old one was so noisey that I couldn’t stand
it after a while. This had come to a head on Friday when I was using the
machine to work from home and the whine from the CPU fan was driving me nuts!

The new heatsink (a Global Win TAK58) isn’t quite as good at cooling the
CPU (the temperatures are a couple of degrees C higher than with the old
unit) but it is as quiet as a mouse, or quieter as it doesn’t squeak. The
main noise from the PC now comes from the two big fans in the back, the PSU
fan and the other one I put in to improve case cooling. It’s a low pitched
white noise which is acceptable and most of that is actually coming from
the power supply fan.

Anyway, back to the weekend. Saturday night was involved with trying to get
the Linux side of things to use power management better so as to keep the
CPU as cool as possible and testing out what the maximum and normal temperatures
I was getting with the new heatsink.

Sunday morning was spent in bed ’til 10:30, listening to Radio 4’s Broadcasting
House programme instead of “Breakfast with Frost” on the telly as that was
just getting plain boring. Various householdy things were done after getting
up, followed by lunch and the weekend talk to my parents on the phone.

Most of the afternoon was spent tinkering with power settings whilst watching
the “Dune” mini-series on Sci-Fi Channel. After this came the World Rally
Championship and Time Team on Channel 4. Now, this is where things
started going down hill. I had planned to watch “Bremner, Bird and Fortune”,
the satirical comedy programme at 8pm, however, a phone call from Rob Newson
put pay to this as he wanted advice on building a Linux 2.2.23 kernel on
his machine. 2.5 hours later, having gone through a step by step configuration
of every option over the phone with him he had a working machine. The one
personal item of news I gained from the whole phone call was that he was
“off to visit people over February, so expect lots of phone calls asking
about Linnux things in March.”

Anyway, by now it was gone 9pm. I flopped down in the chair after the mamoth phone call.

After watching the BBC news at 10pm I went to bed feeling drained. I can’t
see how call centre people manage. Doing technical support on the phone is
tiring as hell. Anyway, 10:15pm, off to bed.

11:20pm.. *RING* *RING*, *RING* *RING* (the phone starts ringing).

It’s Lindsey. It’s nice to heard from her, but at this time of night I just
want to sleep. Still, it was an enjoyable phone conversation. I get back
to bed at about 12:10am. 12:30am *CLATTER**CLANG* a cat outside knocks something
over… so I finally get back to sleep.

At least it’s a lovely morning outside. The sun and moon are shining and the sky is mostly blue.

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OK, I’m not, but that’s the only proper lyric I can find for a Friday, so there!

After som brisk working this morning I dashed home (only 20 minutes late) to wait in for the gas man. He came just after 2pm. So, I’m now sitting at my machine at home with windows displaying stuff at work, doing work things. This is dead useful.

Still, there’s far less social activity at home.. as in none at all. Not that there’s THAT much at work, but at least I do get to meet and talk to real people.

Anyway, plans for the weekend.. none.
Social events.. none.
Housework.. plenty (if I can force myself to bother).

Well, this morning I woke up early. I won;t say bright and early as itwas
still dark outside and my manner wasn’t bright either. In fact I drifted
into wakefulness only realising I was awake after some time.

I don;t know why, but it seems that playing with little Christopher and his
train set has rekindled my interest in model railways which has been domant
for nigh on 20 years now. And it was a subject about which I had been dreaming,
namely, building a garden railway in my back garden and all the complexities
of the engineering involved.

As I lay there I could do nothing more than think of the way of building
such a thing based upon biulding my own pre-cast concrete viaduct sections
and the difficulties of making the foundations for the bases so that they
were perfectly level and to a hieght tolerance of under a millimetre.

Anyway, this is all dreaming as (a) it would cost a huge amount of money
just to buy the tools necessary and hire the digger, (b) I’d have to totally
redo my back garden, and (c) I’m not sure I have the skills to do the foundations
to the accuracy necessary. Oh, and then there’s the concrete cast moulds
to design and build.. which would require Norm Abram’s level of wood working
tools. In total, I’d guess the up-front tooling costs would be in the region
of around £2-3000 (bench saw, mitre box, jigsaw etc.) plus the hire
of a mini digger, surveying gear, laser levels plus the matterials. And this
is merely for the civil engineering to create the viaduct and embankment!
(There’s still the shed to enclose the electrical workings and to store the
rolling stock, the track bases, the wiring, track, scenic matterials and
control systems to buy after that before the first train can run.) And after
that I’d have to start on getting the garden into a good state again.

I’d imagine, all in, to build the permanent way and get a running railway
would probably cost in the region of £5-7000 before adding rolling
stock. Way out of my spending league.

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OK, the only decent Wednesday song lyric I can find.. from “She’s Leaving Home” probably by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

Of cause, I wasn’t up at 5am. Indeed, I overslept this morning slightly and
what a morning to oversleep! I discovered that the main server was down before
leaving home and tried to cycle as fast as i could into work. however, my
legs weren’t really very good this morning, the wind was against me and so
were the majority of the traffic lights. When I did get to the server I found
it was partly my fault. The server had panic’d (the traceback said it was
during a ping) and rebooted but I’d typoed in /etc/vfstab putting a 2 where
there should have been a 3 so it sat there asking for the root password so
it could be helped out.

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I hit the ground running the morning finishing off the install of a lecturer’s laptop with both Linux & XP. Well, that took until 11am.

Following tea, it was down to the machine room to help out a colleague installing CDROMs in the DVD jukebox.

Lunch was a bit late, even later ‘cos I had to cover in the porch of a church half-way to the baguette shop while the heavens opened and a great flood ensued. The return trip was slightly wet but ok, especially as I met nice little Veronica Chang at the traffic lights near the church and she offered me half her umbrella to shade under for the rest of the journey back. (And no, Grim & Alec, she’s not someone I should ask out! :-))

After lunch was gobbled down it was off in the dept. escort to Sinoco to get a replacement motherboard for our librarian’s PC. (It’s suffered a capacitor failure and she was rather desparate as most library things now require a computer to do.) As soon as I got back it was time to throw the M/B into the machine and get it working.

I’ve not just caught up with my e-mail and replaced the paper roll int the A0 printer.. now it’s time for tea!

(PS. I wonder if I can find a song title/lyric containing Wednesday for tomorrw’s update to keep the theme going.)